Gyles Brandreth Quotes

I am the prince of procrastination. It is my besetting sin. I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after

Those who pay their bills on time are soon forgotten. It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.

Praise makes me humble, but when I am abused, I know that I have touched the stars.

There is no friendship possible between men and women[...]. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, zynders to zynders: even those who protest that they never go to funerals have to in the end.

One should always be suspicious of a woman who tells you that her past was burnt in the flames of a schoolhouse in Peshawar.

Don’t switch off. Stay engaged. Resist distraction. Concentrate. Focus. Be present. Smell the coffee. Taste the food. Listen to the speech. Keep that Latin accurate. Stop thinking about what’s coming next, stop checking the mobile, and relish what’s happening now. Seize the day. For all you know, it’s the only one you’ve got. Live in the moment.

Change is the salt in the soup of life.

Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone.

To err is human. To arr is pirate … What a difference a single misplaced letter can make.

In life there are two types of people: those who catch the waiter’s eye and those who don’t.

Oscar sat back and looked at me appraisingly. “I need to think. And to think I must have oysters and champagne.

Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shame on him who thinks evil of this.’ The phrase

Sir Peter Tapsell: ‘You cannot ask the British Prime Minister to autograph a bottle of table wine. You really cannot.’ ‘It is English,’ I bleated. ‘Non-vintage?’ ‘Er … yes.’ ‘Good God, what is the party coming to?

It is curious how men who are good friends, close friends, true friends, who may have been on the most intimate and familiar terms over any number of years, can nevertheless know next to nothing of one another’s love-lives.

Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

La personalidad es algo muy misterioso. No puede valorarse a un hombre por lo que hace. Puede cumplir la ley y ser despreciable. Puede incumplir la ley y aun así ser un caballero. Puede ser malo sin haber hecho nunca nada malo. Puede cometer un pecado contra la sociedad y tomar conciencia, gracias a ese pecado, de su propia perfección...

The peach-out-of-reach in the adjacent orchard is always more alluring than the apple on the ground in one’s own.

To many today Oscar is a gay icon who can do no wrong, but, in truth, he was human, multifaceted and no saint. Part of the tragedy of Oscar Wilde is that it is now almost impossible to view him except through the prism of his downfall.

And, right or wrong, rational or absurd, Oscar Wilde is always fascinating. He is the man you hope will walk into the room and come to sit at the spare place at your table.

The newspapers of today chronicle with degrading avidity the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details of the doings of people of absolutely no interest whatever. I must give them up.

A secret should be kept a secret,” murmured Conan Doyle, now picking up crumbs from his plate with his forefinger. “Once it is no longer a secret, it becomes a serpent—it goes where it will.

Creativity, we’re told, is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

BBC

both were writers of high ambition, with

You’ll recall,” said Sickert, brushing dust from his trousers with the back of his hand, “that a year or two ago I was chased through the back streets of King’s Cross by a posse of prostitutes all crying ‘Jack the Ripper!’ after me.

As you will be aware, gentlemen, I have made it my life’s work to entertain the working classes, enrage the middle classes, and fascinate the aristocracy—but I do believe I’ve just met my match. Accrington ’Arry here is in a class of his own, beyond my reach.

When men give up saying what is charming,” Oscar answered, “they give up thinking what is charming. I hope I’ll never do that.

I mean it,' said Bosie seriously. 'I'd like to murder him, in cold blood.' 'Well, you can't, Bosie,' said Oscar, 'leastways, not tonight.' 'Why not?' demanded Bosie petulantly. 'It's Sunday, Bosie,' said Oscar, 'and a gentleman never murders his father on a Sunday. You should know that. Did they teach you nothing at Winchester?

Life's aim, if it has one, is to be always looking for temptations - and there are not nearly enough of them, I find. I sometimes pass the whole day without coming across a single one. It makes one so nervous about the future.

The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.

He looked closely into Vyvyan’s round and smiling face and said solemnly, “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

He was a celebrity, in the tradition of Lord Byron and Beau Brummell, but more Brummell than Byron, more style than substance. “Evidently I am ‘somebody,’” he noted at the time, “but what have I done? I’ve been ‘noticed.’ That is something, I suppose. And I have published one book of poems. That doesn’t amount to much.

Gerard Bellotti was not a prepossessing sight, nor did he have the appearance of a natural roller-skater: he was grotesquely corpulent.

Mr. Bellotti sounds interesting,” I said, amused. “No,” replied Oscar seriously, “Bellotti is complex without being interesting.

Every Holmes must have his Watson

trug

I aim to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time, work out where we’ve been going wrong (and why), and come up with some tips and tricks to help show how, in future, we can make fewer (rather than ‘less’) mistakes. All right? Is ‘alright’ all right? You’ll find out right here.

Another survey revealed that while nine out of ten primary school children could identify a Dalek, only a third could recognise and name a magpie.

The Brandreth Rule is: when in Rome, do as the Romans do—speak English.

I love the old, but I'm intrigued by the new. And sometimes excited by it, too.

But language is power. Words do make a difference. They can reinforce stereotypes, cause offense, undermine, hurt, and humiliate. You don't have to wrap everything you say in cotton wool, but you should choose your words carefully. Good communication is about courtesy and kindness as well as clarity and getting your message across.

STUDENTS GET FIRST HAND JOB EXPERIENCE’ is a newspaper headline that I have seen with my own eyes. I think you’ll agree: it needed a hyphen, either between ‘first’ and ‘hand’ or between ‘hand’ and ‘job’, depending.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ — fuck off! No, hold on, it’s the longest word in the dictionary; it’s the name of a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; and if you break it down into its constituent parts you can master the spelling quite easily. ‘Pneu-mono-ultra-micro-scopic-silico-volcano-coni-osis.’ There! Done! Hooray!

The way you use the commas should give your sentence its correct meaning — viz: The men, who were handsome, found partners. There, the relative clause tells us that all the men were handsome and all found partners. The men who were handsome found partners. With this restrictive relative clause, without commas, we are discovering something quite different: here, only the men who were handsome found partners.

When you recover your old sofa from the skip and get it re-covered, it may take you a while to recover from the cost. (A hyphen can change the very meaning of a word.)

Some people believe that it was while studying the niceties of British and American spelling that the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted his masterpiece, ‘The Scream’.

But times change, and at the American Copy Editors Society annual gathering in 2014, two editors from the Associated Press Stylebook, the acknowledged grammar bible, declared that ‘more than and over are both acceptable in all uses to indicate a greater numerical value’. Some diehards protested — ‘More than my dead body!’ read one outraged tweet — but generally, on both sides of the continent, it was agreed: the more than versus over conflict is at an end.

While an Edwardian dandy might have wooed his dimpled darling with lovey-dovey terms of endearment, a modern Romeo might use a more contemporary line in flattery: ‘Bae, you is one cool, sick, mean bitch.

At a bus station: TOILETS ONLY FOR DISABLED PREGNANT CHILDREN

If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don’t need to add another full stop: He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless.